No doubt we have all heard of dwell time, and even carried out the action of ‘dwelling’ on many websites – but what is dwell time?
Dwell time is the length of time a visitor spends looking at a page on a website, directly after they clicked the link on a search engine, but before clicking back to the SERP results.
To break that down a little easier for you, here are a couple of scenarios where dwell time can occur:
SCENARIO 1
If you have ever clicked on a search result in Google, then visited a web page and decided that it’s not relevant and clicked back onto your Google search results – then this counts as dwell time.
SCENARIO 2
Similarly, if you have ever clicked on a search result in Google, then visited a web page and found what you were looking for on that page i.e. a contact phone number, and clicked back onto your Google search results – then this also counts as dwell time.
Generally speaking, the lower the dwell time the better, however, as you can see in scenario 2 above, sometimes a visitor does not need to spend much time on a web page to find what they are looking for.
What Dwell Time Is Not
Amidst much confusion out there, we are going to keep it nice and easy, and simply state that:
- Dwell Time Is NOT Bounce Rate
- Dwell Time Is NOT Average Time on Page
- Dwell Time Is NOT Session Duration
- Dwell Time Is NOT Click-Through Rate
Should I Dwell on Dwell Time?
The short answer is no. As with all SEO and marketing metrics, it’s important to note what the important goals are for your business and industry and what might be relevant to you.
For instance, if you are an e-commerce site and your dwell time for your ‘shop’ page is just 20 seconds, then this might be a factor to focus on. However, if your ‘contact’ page dwell time is just 20 seconds then this is likely less of a factor to be concerned about.
So there you have it – you now know what dwell time is, and when it matters. Want to know more or find out how you can fix your dwell time? Contact DigitUX – where our focus is on creating the ultimate Digital UX for visitors.